Telecare Aware

The Disabled Living Foundation (DLF) launched a new site with focused advice for the public this week: Telecare Made Easy. (Press release). It has some excellent features including:

• advice pages and panels
• a wide range of products
• supplier information
• case studies
• the facility for visitors to comment
• an extensive glossary
• a very good ethics section

Most importantly, and uniquely in the telecare world, the site gives you the ability to select similar products and see side-by-side comparisons.

Negatives? Well, I hope it will not be dubbed ‘Tunstall Made Easy’ because of its prevailing presence on the site. Whether the balance changes now depends to a large extent on the efforts of other suppliers to support the DLF’s initiative.

Telecare Made Easy fills a huge gap in telecare information for the public. Like all DLF sites, it will be a continual work in progress and will develop strongly over time. The DLF’s team will welcome constructive feedback to help them do this. My suggestion is that when you first browse the site you scribble notes and comments and pass them on via their Contact Us link which you will find at the bottom of pages.

Telecare Made Easy is a welcome and long-needed development - and a good one. With your feedback it will become a great one.

Here are some informed observations from the American Telemedicine Association’s conference in Seattle last month. American Telemedicine Association Annual Meeting posted 25 April.

These are provided by Larry Keyes of Microdesign Consulting. His long-running and highly informative blog is Tech for Non-Profits: “Non-Profit and non-governmental organizations (NGOS) need technology as much as for-profit corporations. Here’s a chronicle of stuff that works, and lamentations for stuff that doesn’t.”

Thanks to the readers who have voted on their preference for the way Telecare Aware links open (’A question for you…‘ posted 30 April). I’m finding it useful and preference is becoming clear. If you have voted, go to the post to see what the emerging preference is, and if you haven’t voted, you will be able to see it after you have.

In 2007 several themes emerged in the Telecare Aware stories. The principal one has been the positioning of the big players, particularly Intel and Philips, to take advantage of what many people believe will be the next big consumer-driven wave to drive developments in ‘connected homes’ and mobile phone-based applications. The scramble of smaller suppliers to join the Continua Alliance in 2007, despite the cost of membership, shows an industry consensus around the expectation of market development and a desire to not be left out. However, the focus of this trend is health monitoring rather than telecare of the ’social care monitoring’ variety. I’m therefore expecting to see more and more health monitoring stories to appear in the mainstream media in 2008.

Another Telecare Aware theme of 2007 was to give examples of how telecare and telehealth stories were being presented in local print media which, in the UK and US is still a primary means of communication about matters that affect people’s daily lives. Sadly, many of the UK stories followed a rather familiar and pedestrian formula which failed to bring the story alive in a way that would stimulate demand. The best stories seemed to be sparked off when an enthusiastic telecare manager got together with a journalist and they actually went out and visited one or two people.

For 2008, Telecare Aware will continue to bring you news of developments as they occur. Will the speculation (that was doing the rounds in the UK in 2007) that so many councils now have a surplus of telecare equipment sitting unused on their shelves that it is going to be hard for manufacturers to make sales in 2008, turn into a real story? Or will the apparent inability of many councils to stimulate demand for their telecare services lead to casualties amongst supply companies?

For my part, I intend to switch attention this year from local stories to matters of terminology.

The word ‘Telecare’ and its related variants are used across the world in a considerable number of ways and there is no sign of a consensus growing around what systems should be called. I now think the time is ripe for an organisation to agree and promote a consistent worldwide taxonomy. A prime candidate to do so would be, of course, the Continua Alliance. This ought to be a hot issue for it. For example, all the working groups are meeting separately during Continua’s Winter Summit (Ireland, 23-24 January) and without clarity of terminology there is huge scope for confusion.

However, when its very own objectives contain a glaring grammatical error, am I being over-optimistic in thinking that the Continua Alliance could be trusted to sort this out? I do hope not.